Adin Steinsaltz (1937–2020)

Detailed explanation of what the Talmud is and a summary of its teachings. Reading this, one can see why there are so many Jewish scholars, scientists, virtuoso musicians, and so on. All of those things take a lot of intense study, and the study of the Talmud is perhaps the exemplar of such study. After all, it is not just a commentary itself, but there are commentaries on the commentaries (and probably commentaries on the commentaries on the commentaries!) Now, you can also say that arguing for centuries over things that seem so inconsequential is also a great waste of time. And of course, given that the underlying text--the Torah, i.e., the first 5 books of the Jewish Bible--are full of stories about less than honorable people--and I don't just mean NON-Jews--I can also ask, "What's the point? How can anyone believe in any of this?" But, if I were Jewish, the opportunity to spend my life, supported by the state, endlessly re-reading and trying to find new interpretations of the Talmud, would not be an unattractive prospect. But, this book is well organized, clearly written, and though a bit dense at times, actually enjoyable. Well done job of making a bit of a mystery--for a non-Jew in any case--a bit clearer.… (mere)

I'm not going to give stars to the talmud, because that would be weird. What I will say is that I switched to the Koren Noe edition for Daf Yomi about a dozen dapim in and I'm glad I did -- the commentary provides a lot of necessary context. R'Steinsaltz' (z''l) translations are thoughtful and extremely helpful. I did read this primarily in the aramaic, and although my language skills mostly held up the original text is elliptic and full of unclear allusions, and I was very grateful for the side-by-side translation.… (mere)

As the pandemic picked up, I switched over to almost entirely English reading for daf yomi, and the Noe edition held up to this as well. Rarely did I feel like I was missing something crucial (for wordplay and mnemonic devices the shoreshim are including in the English translation as well.) I wish this volume had more information about the personalities -- the superscript P's don't continue on very much for Rabbis discussed in Berakhot and I would have found it helpful to continue to have annotations about who they were. (Aslo, Shabbat is a profoundly dense tractate, often very foreign to the modern reader...or perhaps it's just me who no longer treats jaundice by shaving donkeys, bloodletting them from their head and then anointing patients with the resulting blood. Good thing -- you have to really be careful doing that because if the blood gets in the patient’s eyes it blinds them. And also it's controversial whether you can do that on Shabbat)… (mere)

Well, on the malus side, it probably should have been called Introduction to the Talmud, instead of the Essential Talmud; it’s not that I know anything about this subject, but I thought that I’d be getting edited quotes and a small glimpse of what this very large collection of texts is actually like to read, you know—the way Adin wrote it it’s more like a very very long introductory essay at the beginning of a classic novel, (and the length of some novels lol!), with lots of background information and abstract summaries, but no concrete, Rabbi A said…. Rabbi B said…. Rabbi C said…. ~that you’d get if the some portion of the literal text was translated for me.

But, Jewish law is still an instructive topic. In a sense, it’s more like the modern civilization of science than Christianity is, arguably, even if science isn’t Jewish in any particular way (and Yiddishkeit is very particular, of course, very specific). Instead of consisting of abstractions about philosophy and one or two core principles, or abstractions about love or a particular divine Teacher to learn to love from, Judaism, especially in the crucial sense of Jewish law, basically consists of the particular, the specific rules and standards people should adhere to according to religion in all of the many many concrete situations of life, not unlike our practical scientific civilization, which cares more about results than anything else, either for worse or possibly for better at times…. Of course, traditional Orthodox Judaism, of which Adin is an adherent, has some problems common with other pre-modern cultures, not least the separated condition of women, which poses a real difficulty and should not simply be glossed over as it is in most of the old books. Still, Jewish law does provide a good counter-example to the idea that religion is ‘stupid’, unreasoned, not like science in any way. And hopefully there will always be Jewish women and men, in all of the centuries of the future times of Earth.… (mere)